"The New Mother" and Coraline

L

Loldodh

New member
Have any of you who have seen Coraline ever read the Victorian fairy tale on which the Other Mother is partially based? Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother" is straight up the most horrifying and screwed up story intended for children I've ever encountered. I'm going to link it so you can go read it, then come back here and we'll discuss.

http://www.archive.org/stream/anyhowstoriesmor00clifiala#page/n23/mode/2up

Here's a synopsis and commentary, too, but I really suggest you read the whole story:

http://www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2009/03/new-mother-and-coraline.html

And Gaiman's own commentary on Clifford:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2002/06/yesterday-i-walked-around-garden.asp

Finally, here is another version you might have seen. This is sort of the public domain, oral tradition version, clearly based on Clifford's original but stripped down, "The Pear Drum."

http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0084.pdf

So, yeah, the new mother has:

Glass eyes and a wooden tail

That sounds silly out of context, which Clifford might have been going for to slightly lighten the mind poison in her morality tale. But she failed because it's also so bizarre, unexplained and sinister that it simple heightens the helpless terror this kind of thing inspires in children. There's no answer to the "why" of it other than, "because you were bad." Abandonment by your parents is one of the worst fears of childhood, and the idea that a loving parent could be replaced by an inexplicable -thing- is a lot to inflict on a child.

Anyway, this is just another example of the fascinating and horrible things that are running around in Neil Gaiman's head. The Other Mother from Coraline might not be as extreme and insurmountable, but it seems the movie did do a good job of bringing something of her creepy essence to the screen with the button eyes.
 
Heh, I remember reading this when I was abput ten - it was in a big treasury of fairy tales I had bought. At first I grouped it with all the other bannaly moralistic stories (Hansel & Gretel, anyone?), but it was playing with such a deep-rooted fear that it was much more effective then any of them. and waaaaay put of place among them.

I think there's actually an explanation for the "glass eyes, wooden tail" thing: a mother with glass eyes would be unable to cry, or - if we want to assume Clifford was being really metaphorical - love. And since she uses the wooden tail to break into the house, couldn't she also use it to, say, beat the crap out of some bad little kids?:ack::p

I thought the Urchin Girl character is intriguing too - I love it when vague, metaphyscial concepts like disobedience are given human form. Haven't actually set down and watched/read Coraline yet, so I can't comment on Gaimans use of the concept - but the snatches I've catched look intriguing.
 
I think the Urchin can also be seen as an emissary of Satan, in the "Satan tempts you to do bad" mold. I think I've actually seen a version where this was made very obvious.
 
I actually have a collection of scary tales called "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" and one of the stories is called "The Drum" in which a couple of kids become bad in order in to get a drum from a gypsy girl but instead of getting the drum, their mom leaves them and they get a new mom with glass eyes and a wooden tail. :(
 
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